SC - Re: Blanc Desire

[Heather Payton]

- -----Original Message-----
From: Alderton, Philippa <phlip at morganco.net>
To: sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG <sca-cooks at Ansteorra.ORG>
Date: 8. maí 1999 23:57
Subject: SC - Flummery


>Anybody have a recipe or three for flummery? Because of its association
with
>my beloved Nero Wolfe, I'd dearly love one- also its derivation, if that's
>available.


This is how Gervase Markham describes flummery in his English Hus-wife:

"From this small Oat-meal, by oft steeping it in water and cleansing it, and
then boiling it to a thick and stiff Jelly, is made that excellent dish of
meat which is so esteemed in the West parts of this Kingdom, which they call
Wash-brew, and in Chesire and Lancashire they call it Flamerie or Flumerie."

>From The Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse:

"To make French Flummery:
Take a quart of cream, and half an ounce of isinglass, beat it fine, and
stir it into the cream. Let it boil softly over a slow fire a quarter of an
hour, keep it stirring all the time; then take it off, sweeten it to your
palate and put in it a spoonful of rose water, and a spoonful of
orange-flower water; strain it, and pour it into a glass or bason, or what
you please, and when it is cold turn it out. It makes a fine side-dish. You
may eat it with cream, wine, or what you pleas. Lay round it baked pears. It
both looks very pretty, and eats fine."

Mrs. Glasse also has a couple of recipes for hartshorn flummery.

As to the origins of the name, this is what I found in Cupboard Love by Mark
Morton:
"People who are not from Wales have great difficulty reproducing certain
Welsh consonants; as a result, the Welsh word llymru was rendered into
English not only as flummery but also as thlummery, the latter most easily
said after a trip to the dentist. Flummery, of course, prevailed over
thlummery and from the early seventeenth to the mid eighteenth century the
word referred, like the original Welsh term, to a sour jelly made by boiling
oatmeal with the husks. In the mid eighteenth century, flummery also
developed two new meanings: it became the name of a sweet dish made of milk,
flour, and eggs, and simultaneously it came to mean empty praise or
gibberish. In this, flummery underwent the reverse development of the word
trifle, whose original sense was idle tale but which also came to denote a
dish of sponge-cake and cream."

Nanna



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